Three facts about 2016: UN reported that 102 million people were on the brink of starvation, up 30% on 2015; Sir Martin Sorrell, MBA, defied investors and paid himself £70m; asked why he hadn’t paid any tax over the previous eighteen years, Donald Trump replied ‘[b]ecause I’m smart’. Is there a connection?

The world is facing destruction in various forms, from the loss of social cohesion by unsustainable and ever increasing levels of inequality of wealth and income, both between and within economies, the waste of finite resources, the pollution of oceans and atmosphere, a looming mass species extinction and the avoidable inevitability of global warming. All that against a background of exploding global population, from 1bn in 1800, 3bn by 1960, 7bn by 2012 and forecast to reach around 9.5bn by 2050.

Business historian Alfred Chandler suggested that business was the most important institution in the economy and its managers the most influential. It was, he argued, considerably more powerful than Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of market forces. Clearly, business could play the lead role in correcting those damages. But business is destroying the Earth.

Business leaders do not just command business. They are also influential over finance and the media, as well as academia through their funding of research and academic institutions, especially business schools. And they are hugely influential over political decision making through their £multi-billion funded lobbying industry, politically oriented think-tanks and the operation of revolving doors through which individuals progress between these various sectors and government. Those are the various components of what Roosevelt referred to as ‘organised money’ when he ended the austerity driven Great Depression by introducing the New Deal back in the 1930s. ‘Government by organized money was,’ he said, ‘just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.’ Today it is far more dangerous.

Those various components of organized money are mostly led by the products of business school education. Continue reading Sustainable Management Education →

GDP is a hugely misleading measure of economic wellbeing. It includes items which are actually destructive of the real economy on which most people’s wellbeing depends. Not only that, but most of it is actually immeasurable.

They used to measure progress by GNP which tried to measure nationally owned economic activity, no matter where it took place. But as successive governments presided over the disposal of UK owned assets to foreign corporates and governments, GNP reported the post-industrial economies as shrinking. Self-interested politicians found GDP a more convenient measure, since it ignored that massive fire sale and provided short term breathing space. So, despite the long term damage done to the real economy, those disposals, nominated as foreign direct investment, were actually celebrated in the UK as demonstrating it as ‘open for business’.

That fits nicely with the Milton Friedman version of the free market open access ideology that took command of Anglo-American politics since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. Initially, that perspective included an acknowledgement of the theoretical importance of the quantity of money circulating in the economy. That quantity would determine the rate of inflation as well as the growth of the economy. Politicians tried it and it failed, to such an extent that even Friedman himself confessed disappointment.
Continue reading GDP, Austerity and Wellbeing →